I've be reading Anandtech articles for a long time and i have to say that this article is so biased that i think it should be retracted. I can't wait for the next pro intel article.

The MySQL and Sun combination attained a result of 712.87 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard running a 64-bit version of MySQL 5.0 and SJSAS 9.0 on Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire(TM) X4100 servers powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors(1). The result demonstrates superb scalability of the whole solution, as compared to the previous result of 266 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard that was achieved with Single-Core AMD Opteron processors (2). This solution also demonstrated the best database performance, measured in SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard per database core (SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard /DB core), of any competitive submission using less than 20 total cores in database and application tiers. MySQL's SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard /DB core metric surpassed an Oracle-powered result by over 30 percent (3).

MySQL Helps Set World Record in Java Application Server Benchmarks; High-Speed Open Source Software Blaze Past Proprietary Solutions
CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 12, 2006--A popular application server benchmark, featuring a complete open source software stack with MySQL 5.0 database, the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System, and Sun Java(TM) Systems Application Server 9.0 Platform Edition (Project GlassFish(SM)) has shattered the competition by offering up to 8.6 times lower cost of acquisition than the comparable solution (1,4), according to the benchmark test results published at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/jAppSer...">http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/jAppSer....

Maintained by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC(R)), the SPECjAppServer(R)2004 test is a recognized industry standard benchmark used to measure performance of Java EE application server platforms and each of the components that make up the application environment -- including hardware, database software, JDBC drivers, JVM software and the system network. It is designed to model a real-world automotive dealership application, including manufacturing, supply-chain management and an order/inventory system.

"Open Source software can provide dramatic benefits for enterprise IT applications - especially in terms of real performance and TCO," said Ethan O'Rafferty, director of Strategic Alliances for MySQL AB. "We are proud that Solaris 10 is an ideal deployment platform for MySQL 5.0."

The MySQL and Sun combination attained a result of 712.87 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard running a 64-bit version of MySQL 5.0 and SJSAS 9.0 on Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire(TM) X4100 servers powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors(1). The result demonstrates superb scalability of the whole solution, as compared to the previous result of 266 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard that was achieved with Single-Core AMD Opteron processors (2). This solution also demonstrated the best database performance, measured in SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard per database core (SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard /DB core), of any competitive submission using less than 20 total cores in database and application tiers. MySQL's SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard /DB core metric surpassed an Oracle-powered result by over 30 percent (3). Reply

"To interpret the graphs below precisely, you must know that the X-axis gives you the number of demanded requests and the Y-axis gives you the actual reply rate of the server. The first points all show the same performance for each server, as each server is capable of responding fast enough. "

1. "you use workstaion/budget motherboard against the intel server board. use a sun galaxy or hp proliant. "

No, we do not. We used the MSI K2-102A2M for ALL opteron testing except the one where we tested MySQL with Solaris as the serverworks chipset was not supported by Solaris x86.
Note that this server performed better than the HP DL385, which uses slower memory timings. Using the HP proliant would have resulted in slightly LOWER Opteron numbers not faster!
I don't get that a few people make a big fuzz about the MSI K8N Master2-FAR, as we only use it once, out of necessity as it worked under Solaris. Know that Solaris x86 supports only a limited amount of x86 hardware.

2. About our testing methods: yes, we use our own benchmarks. We'll add some industry standard benchmarks to the mix later. However, Industry benchmarks are what manufacturers optimize for, while our benches come straight out of the realworld, and are what real people are using. The same tests showed the Opteron beating the old Xeon by a pretty big margin, check our previous MySQL results. I don't see why now all of a sudden our tests should be changed

If you feel there are other issues, feel free. I will definitely try to answer any concerns you have. Reply

hmm thx for the reply. thats clear now. seeing all the reactions here on your review.
it seems that the way its build up is far from structured and people do have problems reading it.

you didn't answer my question why some benches are single sock some dual sock... but i quess you are rather busy.

the way you talk as this core is the best thing (not released yet) against a new platform from competition that will be launched at same time... still does make me wonder but anyhow.

your own benchmarks and rather strange OS for benches (with personal tweaking) is still not relevant. Giving results on a far more used platform would be much nicer to compare... but i already have a good idea of the few benches you will be showing in this review on a wintel OS (let's hope i am wrong). youre benches on linux might be straight out of real world, but impossible to verify.

The only comparisson you make are 2 Spec benches and they were probably done also on that nice linux platform.... looking at the figures. but how comes that for one or another reason the opteron is clocked now at 2800 while you have 2400 and 2600 systems?
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1. Why no dual socket, quadcore in some benches:
the reason is that with the LAMP tests we ended up with a limit in our httperf benchmark: it couldn't measure anything above more than 3000 req/s for some reason. So there is another bottleneck kicking in. So we avoided the bottleneck for now by not testing with quad core. This was happening on both the Opteron as the Woodcrest system.

2. The Gentoo numbers of the previous review that gained 9-10% was a comparison between 1 Dualcore and two dual single Core CPUS. Note that the same review shows only 38% performance increase from one to two CPUs.

3. A few people try to discredit this review in every way possible, I well aware of that. However, even though these benchmarks can't be repeated by other people for obvious reasons (the databases are not available to the public), the benches are in line with what other people have found.

<Quote>The Gentoo numbers of the previous review that gained 9-10% was a comparison between 1 Dualcore and two dual single Core CPUS. Note that the same review shows only 38% performance increase from one to two CPUs.</Quote>

Correct me if I am wrong. Follow the link below to Anandtech's own earlier benchmarks. Goto the last table on the page and check results of "Dual Dual Core 875" and "Dual Opteron 248" from 5 Concurrencies onwards. The increase is slight, but there is definetly no performance degradation. The earlier review too uses Opterons+Linux+MySQL+InnoDB, the same as this setup used. Why do you get totally different results sets this time around?

In the next page of the same review, DB2 shows fanastic gains from 5 Concurrencies onwards when going from Dual Cores to Four Cores. Check the first table under "Benchmarks IBM DB2: Single core versus Dual core". Note results of "Dual Opteron 2.2 hz" and "Dual Dual Core AMD 2.2 Ghz". This too is on linux. DB2 is definetly better suited than MySQL to reflect gains when moving from two core to four core setup.

Was publishing the obviously wrong MySQL results that you got this time necessary?

Despite choosing Gentoo, for the optmization capabaility, you have not chosen to publish the optimizations options used. Gentoo gurus would have verified that the optimizations for each of the processors where fairly chosen. This is not a allegation that you have taken sides, but why hold back some specific info when they are not secretive or proprietery in nature? And yes, I know you have used Gentoo in many previous benchmarks without specifiying the optimizations, but as this review seems to have become conterversial, it will help clear the air a bit. Specifying the options used when you have deviated from the default settings will surely increase credibility of review.articles.

Using a standard, preconfigured and widely available package like Debian, RHEL or SLES in their default settings was another option to ensure a neutral platform.

Cant comment about other parts of the review as I was only interested in the database performance

<Quote>A few people try to discredit this review in every way possible, I well aware of that.</Quote>

Why cant readers of Anandtech question the process used in a review? Afterall its their page views / site visit that brings the ad revenue. Readers tend to have limited time to go thru and comment if they want to. Exaggration may happen when we dont have time to express our doubts in detail. Your comment above was cheap shot.

Still, nice to see that Intel finally has something that can be compared to a Opteron. Good to have a choice, but the 3 year wait was too long.

The test you link is running apachebench while testing how fast STATIC html can be sent. Our LAMP test has to run PHP, access the MYSQL database, make calculations on that data ... this called DYNAMIC content.

If you do not understand why a static HTML page can be served many times faster than a complex one with dynamic content, well...

You are basically saying that a test is wrong because it doesn't give the same results as another test which tests with different software, different dataset. Duh.
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But still, it's stupid to use and publish benchmark results from a test that can't handle/test the systems at their max.
Come on, get real, it's like testing a Lada and a Ferrari on a track that can't do more then 100KM/H and then state, look how well the Lada keeps up with the Ferrari.

Also, what's wrong with static HTML tests?
I see no harm in those, many websites are still static.
And you used them before to show how fast the Opterons where, so why not again?
Now we have absolutly nothing to compare or verify....so bogus test-results.
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Dell has released some new servers with the new Intel Woodcrest platform. The pricing is less than for the older Netburst architecture servers... It looks like we'll have a price war on our hands, and of course AMD will end up losing that battle since Intel has lower production costs with higher volume.

Also interesting to note, the 3.0Ghz Woodcrest Intel processor that was quite competitive in this review is the lowest end processor on the new Dell servers. Their highest end one is a 3.73 Ghz part. AMD's highest end dual core server processor is currently 2.6 Ghz. So there's additional performance gains for Intel vs AMD in a highest end server processor shootout.

I'm disappointed that AMD hasn't done more since they released the K8 architecture. AMD has also been slow to release their new server platform with Pacifica enhancements.

It's too bad that Dell has taken so long to begin using AMD in servers. They've held the performance lead for quite some time. With technology and market leaders changing so fast, they should have been faster to adjust their product lineup. Reply

duh my dear friend.... the dell servers you are pointing to can be checked where? link?
you are mixing woodcrest that is at max 3000mhz and the dempsey 3.73 both on the same platform. dempsey is still no match for the woodcrest and opterons, so thats normal that the price tag is that low...... and its already dead before it is even launched

check this review, the dempsey is still wiped out on 90% of all the benches by an old architecture and certainly if you would check the power consumption/performance chart.

@anand, those type of benches would be nice on a woodcrest, if you fail to give them now by "any reason" they will be available in the near future by other reviewers. so its always better to be the first :) Reply

This is a sad sad display. And i dont mean the review, i mean everybody bashing this article and each other like their lives depended on it.
Its a cpu review on a hardware site, try to put it into perspective.

You read it, you draw your own conclusions if you want to, you go on with your life. Reply

but Anandtech was a site you could rely onto get unbiased reviews. I have configured specs for atleast 25 machines based on Anandtech reports. Whenever somebody asked which CPU or someother part was better, I would suggest that they search for its review on Anandtech.

Even in the IDF conroe demo, Anandtech failed to identify some parts of the Intel setup that could have impacted performance, it was only after readers expressed their displeasure that Anandtech did a second review with the updates that should have actually been part of the Intel setup preview

If this new found low of Anandtech continues, I'll have to choose a different site to base my decisions on.

Also remember, Intel has previously used and continues to use Anandtech review of its processors in its analysts meet and at other places. As somebody pointed out, even a $0.15 swing in Intel share prices alters its valuation by one billion dollar!!! Intel could buy a handful of review reports by favoring advertising budgets for a fraction of that money.

Anandtech made my life a little easier by giving unbiased reviews, looks like I'll have to get back to comparing results from a few reviews as I used to do before I discovered Anandtech Reply

This site was once THE HARDWARE SITE for me and I always recommended it to others.

If Intel has a better chip hey that's great! But.... what is with the OBVIOUS underhanded reporting against AMD and for INTEL that has been going on here for the past few months?

It is so blatant here that I am starting to wonder of Intel's new chips are a lot of smoke and mirrors. If it is such a great chip it should speak for itself, not with all this closed testing and crippled AMD machines. Makes me wonder.

You would think after reading all the Anand Intel press that the new CPUs could cure cancer and cook dinner. Reply

i can give 2 pages full of rather strange figures and compares about this review. but i hope you'll bring the readers the windows benches fast and compare with other published benches so everybody can see that the linux optimization can shift wherever you want.

you use workstaion/budget motherboard against the intel server board. use a sun galaxy or hp proliant.

the specint and specfp are not correct, even intel gives way other numbers

some benches are done with one socket others with 2 socket. why?

mysql benches are optimized for two cores thats very clear.. the perfromance drop on opteron is much more the the one on woodcrest. knowing the architecture of the opteron this should be the other way round. the opteron is lacking here due to the motherboard

you can extrapolate it in a different way showing different results, again you use 2 different opterons and use thsi difference to calculate 3.0, both setups are workstation and therefore performance is wrong. some benches you even talk and calculate 2 systems but not showing on the graphs.

your conclusion: is rather funny. you state that the wooodcrest is the best performing server on a platform that has maybe 2% worlwide support with benches that can not be compared to other publication. no linnear powerconsuption with other servers because no exual hardware setup and most systems use 2gb/cpu thats a +28w consumption for the woodcrest.

as stated from line 1 give some real world benches where people can compare with other posted results. Reply

for those who think MSI board must be good because they list it on their server pages,

Just look at the memeory banks

MSI has a single bank, forcing the 2nd CPU to share the memory channel, reducing memory bandwidth to both CPUs, and increasing memory latencies. They are discarding NUMA capabailities to keep the price at around 250$

Now check Tyan k8we and Supermicro h8dci boards linked below. Notice that they all carry two seperate memory banks, giving each processor its own dedicated bank. This doubles the available memory bandwidth and keeps lantencies low.

Iwill D8kn is another similar board that I can recall. They all recommend that you put atleast on card in each bank in a two processor setup to utilize the extra bandwidth.

But adding this extra bank comes at a cost, all the above boards are priced around $500 mark. Its common knowledge in the AMD community that one needs get the boards with seperate memory banks if on is looking for a high performance machine.

If you still have doubt, check the review on GamePC, linked below. Notice that the Tyan TIGER k8we, (with single memory channel to both CPUs like the MSI board) is beaten in every benchmark by Tyan THUNDER k8we (which has dedicated memory channels for both CPUs)
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What you're saying in general is irrelevant. Intel calls their integrated graphics "high performance" but that doesn't make it so.

MSI calling that a server board is just marketing, it does not represent what a true, high performance server class mobo is all about. Not that it's a bad piece of hardware, it is good for the price to be sure. But it is NOT a server class product. Reply

One of the motherboards used in this review is a cheap piece that trades performance to keep price low.

Why was that motherboard selected over mainstream server/workstation boards that are proven to offer slightly better performance? Why pick a 250$ MSI board for opteron over $500 boards from Tyan, Iwill, Supermicro or others. The Intel Xeon "Inderwale" gets a $500 board, so price could not have been the issue.

So what's the point in using a Single Channel board for this benchmark, when price was not a limitation?

Single memory channel boards like the one from MSI, are known to offer lower performance than dual / dedicated memory channel boards when used in 2P Opteron configurations. Dual Channel boards are the mainstream boards for 2P Opteron systems. There are plently Server boards available in Dual / dedicated memory lane configuration. There are enough reviews on the net to show the performance diff b/w single memory channel boards and dual memory channel boards

The issue is not about the MSI or its class, the issue is why did Anandtech pick a Single memeory channel board instead of a more mainstream dual memory channel board.

and Intel woodcrest may have fantastic performance when compared to earlier xeons,

but Intel is 3 years late to the party, Opteron was here in 2003!

also remember, woodcrest is a brand new design from PIII base, manufactured on 65nm process. It is still to make its debut in the market and be available in volumes. Amd its indeed nice to see it being compared to a 3 year old design manufactued on 90nm process.

AMD still has two product launches to come this year. Move to DDR2 for opterons which should cut some power usage for the total system AND introduction of products manufactured on 65nm at the fag end of the year. Will woodcrest and conroe still retain their performance margins then? if not, for how many months or weeks has Intel grabbed this "performance crown"? Reply

- If comparisons could be made between new products from both companies (i.e., Woodcrest versus K8L), they would be made. In the game of leapfrog that we have betweeen AMD and Intel, the comparisons will always be between existing tech and new tech. Will you be pointing out how AMD is "late to the party" when they release their new stuff?

- Making its debut and availability in volume is an issue for both AMD and Intel. It's not a valid point unless you make it across the board.

- 65nm will allow clock speeds of Opterons/A64's to increase.. but Conroe/Woodcrest speeds will be increasing as well. Reply

a 35 billion$ dollar turnover company (Intel) is bound to make a comeback one day.

it Anandtech's review setup, its full of holes

the mysql benchmark on Dual Dual core opterons where they see a 30% drop against single core dual processor numbers in this becnhmark contradicts their own earlier benchmark where they see a 10% performance increase.

yeah right its a workstation motherboard it uses an nforce controller so maybe they rate it as server board it still is a budget board used for workstations, not a real server board or server chipset like they used on the intel woodcrest.

check the servers like sun galaxy and hp dl385 they have amd chipsets... big difference.
the nforce has a shared memory bus... Reply

In corporate environments, no-one with any hardware budget at all runs webserver and database on the same machine, as it hurts both performance and reliability. This affects T1 most, as its low clock speed and simple cores are not meant for database workloads.
I think that you should run web serving tests using common, high-performance Opteron DB server and separate webservers, as it would be the case in real-world scenarios. Reply

And the do more pay less, is not like you say on the server market, while your PC is doing lot of work (processing) with a computer game, most servers stand there doing almost nothing. Our servers for example from 0:00 to 8:00 do almost zero. Even in the day they work very little. Our Xeon 2.4 is more than enough, and I think most people think the same. Of course this depends a lot what you do, but this is generic. I think you know why virtualization is very important right? Reply

It will be interesting to note the Delta difference between 1 Woodcrest 5160 and 2 is 59W as reported by TechReport, and since the TDP for Woodcrest 5160 is 80W TDP we can extrapolate and since the TDP for Woodcrest 5148 is 40W I can expect it to spew about 30W per processor.

245W - (2x29W) = 187W

This bring the Low Power Woodcrest system to ~ the same power usage as the HE Opteron 275's even with the heat spewing FB-DIMM's with higher performance per watt, pretty impressive. Reply

I amd going to make the argument that evaluating only one version of Linux in this type of situation is not a good idea in and of itself. Not to knock Gentoo directly, it is a fine distro to itself, but it has a very small slice of the Linux market. It would have made more sense for Anandtech to have benchmarked using other distrobution types for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is the ability to duplicate the tests. This is actually a strike against Gentoo for what the operating system is. While it possible to duplicate an installation of Gentoo and the applications used, generating an exact copy of the exact configuration used without clear description of the compile targets used is very hard. This means that anybody wishing to reproduce these results on their own will be very hard-pressed to do so.

The second reason is commercial and residential use. Gentoo has it's market, that market just isn't very widespread. It would have made more sense for Anandtech to have tested a RPM based distro such as Mandriva, RedHat, Fedora Core, Novell Suse, or OpenSuse against a .deb based distro such as Debian(sid), Ubuntu, Mepis, or Xandros. The reason why it would have made more sense is that .deb and .rpm distros are actually used in the commercial and residential spheres, and used in great quantities. Had Anandtech used a distrobution that is in active use it would mean more to buyers currently looking to replace their Windows computers with a new system.

It would only be in the interests in providing a point of perspective that one would test a different type of Linux distrobution like Gentoo or Slackware.

Going back to the first point, had Anandtech benchmarked these on a Debian based system it would be fairly easy to duplicate the tests. Anandtech would just need to list the base version of the Debian distro they used, list the apt-repositories they pulled from, and the application in apt that were pulled. Anybody else who comes along afterwords with a Debian based distro would easily be able to duplicate the steps and the benchmarks.

The overall point is that while it is nice to see a non-dedicated Linux site approaching hardware, this isn't the way to approach it. As it stands now, the Anandtech tests are useless, reguardless of whatever results the benchmarks returned. Reply

These tests are also 100% useless.....
The MSI K2-102 is numa aware....
But for some reason the K8N-Master isn't shown in the graphs....that board is NOT NUMA aware.
I'm also missing the HP server everywhere in the graphs.

I realy believe all these tests are done on the K8N-Master board for all Opteron tests.
No way the graphs are showing all the systems.

These tests are a total fraude, letting us believe Intel all of a sudden became that fast.
No way on earth I believe any of these results.

Also, why using Gentoo? Why not Debian 64bit?
This puzzles me, as Gentoo is compiled but not known to be faster on every system.
Why not using precompiled Linuxes? Like Debian 64bit....that one is stable as hell and incredible fast!
Too much parameters missing here to get any judgement at all.
Do it better, this is 100% rubbish.

I should have mentioned this: most of the tests have also been done on SUSE linux SLES9. The reason why we use Gentoo is that we are able to use the latest kernel and to tune the kernel specifically for the AMD or Intel architecture.

With SUSE Enterprise you need to wait for SUSE to use a new kernel. Your suggestion is noted, and from now on I will include the SUSE SLES numbers too.

But to call our numbers useless, well that is a heavy exageration. There was about 1-2% difference between running on Gentoo than on SUSE. It is only natural: they both use more or less the same kernel, only the tools are different. Reply

If you have specifically used Gentoo for the optimization options that it provides, why didn't you list the specific compile time optimizations for Intel and AMD that were finally used to run the benchmarks? The purpose of a independent benchmark is to ensure a setup that is neutral and verifiable by any third party using similar hardware and software. Does your review report provide the info necessary for the same?

Your earlier benchmarks using Linux + DB2 show dual dual core opterons gaining 50% - 80% improvement over dual single core opteron when more than 5 threads come into picture, and a mere 1% to 2% gain in case of one or two threads. Okay, I know DB2 was not part of this benchmarks this around, but shoudn't these figures have setoff enough alarm bells to force inclusion of something other than MySQL for database benchmarks?

Even MySQL on gentoo shows a modest 10% to 17% gain with concurrency numbers from 5 and higher in Sinle Core + Dual CPU vs Dual Core + Dual CPU. Strange that Linux and MySQL misbehave on Opteron this time and show a 10% performance degradation! You deserve a award for this! How can somebody contradict their own earlier benchmarks?

The MSI motherboard you used for the benchmarks has only a single channel to the memory bank for both the processors, a comprise made to cut its price and compete in the lowest market segment for 2P Opteron boards. A major design feature of the Opteron is its ability to use seperate memory channels for each procesor giving it NUMA capabilities, and dedicated memory lanes also cut lantencies when accessing the memory. Did you specifically choose this motherboard to negate opterons advantage? The Intel board used for "Irwindale" retails for around $500, the price for one used for woodcrest is not known, the MSI board is available for $250, so even the price range is different! "relatively cheap workstation board" as you noted in your earlier benchmarks. Were Tyan K8WE, ASUS K8N-DL, Supermicro H8DCi or the Iwill DK8EW that are more popular, so hard to come by? Also you dont specify which of the three opteron systems was used for which benchmark, or was it a average of three. The extreme attention to details usually found at Anand is suprisingly lacking for this review

where are the postgresql quad core benchmarks? My experience is that 2-4 cores on postgresql gives you 1.7x the power on non i/o constrained databases. This would have been a huge upset to have PostgreSQL blow out mysql in a quad core configuration.

also a postgresql.conf containing non-default values would have been nice. Reply

right...what I meant was, could you please supply .conf entries which where edited and changed from the stock configuration. Actually, for this type of benchmark (90% read), there's not a whole lot to change in postgresql.conf...generally the more writes there are the more you have to tweak.

the major tweak in postgresql is to use prepared statements over the parameterized interface...
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With the recent "official" support in Ubuntu for that Niagra server, would it be possible to also include performance numbers for that server running Linux?

I have seen other benchmarks showing Linux to have improved performance on the same hardware compared to Solaris. Filesystem performance is typically much higher in ext2 vs ufs+logging, and if you scan Sun's issue tracking database, there are many entries for libc and kernel operations which are much slower than Linux.

The Verify/s graph (the last one on the page) doesn't have a line for the Dual Opteron yet the author still claims "Again, the Opteron takes the lead." Does the Dual Opteron take the lead and there was just an error in showing up on the graph?

Also in the signs/s chart the Dual Woodcrest tops out at just over 6,000 and the Dual Opteron tops out at just over 5,000, which is a 20% lead, yet the author writes "The Opteron at 2.4 GHz has no trouble keeping up with the 3 GHz Woodcrest." I'm not trying to be a nitpicky fanboy here but being beaten by 20% isn't "keeping up," at least not in my defition of the expression.

Finally, I have a question. Why are there no Windows-based tests? I know that LAMP is very popular in the webserving part of the server world but in most other server/enterprise areas it's mostly Windows, SQL Server, Visual Studio, .NET, etc. I'd like to see some benchmarks that use software that those of us in the non-webserving community are most likely to use. I know there's no chance of running the UltraSPARC in a Windows configuration but quite frankly who cares. I would like to see which of the x86 offerings (which is FAR more likely to be used) is better. Reply

Running 4 threads of SSL on 8 core Opteron gives you almost exactly the same scores as 4 threads on a 4 core Opteron. The 2.2 GHz DC Opteron runs at almost exactly the same speed as the 3 GHz woodcrest (that is why you can almost not see it), the 2.4 GHz is clearly in the lead.

Sign/s: the 2.4 GHz Opteron is keeping up.

Windows tests: see Jason Clark :-). At the end of this week, Jason will present the Windows based ones. Reply

Can't keep a company the size of Intel with all it's resources down for too long. They came back and came back hard. I'm sure AMD was expecting this and I'm guessing they have some kind of contingency plan to counter. It might not be this year, but I would expect that in Q1 of 07, they will have some big announcements.

Finally Intel can give AMD some real competition in the two socket server market. This shows why Dell only wanted to go with AMD for 4S and not 2S server systems...

245w vs 374w and a huge performance lead over the previous Intel generation is a huge leap for Intel.

It will be interesting to see how much these systems are going to cost:
1) is the fb-dimm's gonna be expensive?
2) is the cpu's gonna be expensive?
3) is the motherboards gonna be expensive?

For AMD neither the ram nor the motherboards are expensive, so I am curious how this goes..

If anybody thinks I am an Intel fanboy, I have bought in this sequence: intel amd intel intel, and I would have gotten and amd instead of an intel for the last computer, except I wanted a laptop ;) Reply

For enterprise servers, price isn't usually a critical concern. You often buy what runs your company best, though of course there are plenty of corporations that basically say "Buy the fastest Dell" and leave it at that.

FB-DIMMs should cost slightly more than registered DDR2, but not a huge difference. The CPUs should actually be pretty reasonably priced, at least for the standard models. (There will certainly be models with lots of L3 cache that will cost an arm and a leg, but that's a different target market.)

Motherboards for 2S/4S are always pretty expensive - especially 4S. I would guess Intel's boards will be a bit more expensive than equivalent AMD boards on average, but nothing critical. (Note the "equivalent" - comparing boards with integrated SCSI and 16 DIMM slots to boards that have 6 DIMM slots is not fair, right?)

Most companies will just get complete systems anyway, so the individual component costs are only a factor for small businesses that want to take the time to build and support their own hardware. Reply

Registered DDR2 is dirt cheap, so if FB-DIMMs are only slightly more expensive thats really good.

About compareing 6 DIMM slot and 16 DIMM slot motherboards, I agree, you can't do it. The number of banks is also important, we have a motherboard at work with 8 ranks and 6 DIMM slots, so only two of the slots can be filled with the cheapest 2gb dual rank memory. Currently 2gb single ranks modules are 50% more expensive than dual rank modules.

Which brings another question.. Does FB-DIMM have the same "problem" with rank limit in addition to slot limit? Or does the FB part take care of that? Reply

why are we running servers with only 4GB RAM. I have that in my desktop. Not ot nitpick but I think you shuld load up 16GB and rerun the tests. If not this is a low end test, not HPC. I saw the last Apache comparison and it seems like the benchmark is different. Opteron was winning by 200-400% in those tests. What happened? Reply

I didn't say the scores, I said the units in the benchmark. I'm not attacking you. It just stuck out in my head that the units didn't seem to be the same as the last test with Paxville. By saying HPC, I mean apps that use 16GB RAM, like Apache/Linux/Solaris. I'm not saying you purposely couldn't get 12 more GB of RAM but all things being equal 16GB would be a better config for both systems.

No problem. Point is your feedback is rather unclear. AFAIK, I haven't tested with Paxville. Maybe you are referring to my T2000 review, where we used a different LAMP test, as I explained in this article. In this article the LAMP server has a lot more PHP and MySQL work.

Most HPC usage models don't depend on massive amounts of RAM, but rather on data that can be broken down into massively parallel chunks. IBM's BlueGene for example only has 256MB (maybe 512MB?) of RAM per node. When I think of HPC, that's what comes to mind, not 4-way to 16-way servers.

The amount of memory used in these benchmarks is reasonable, since more RAM only really matters if you have data sets that are too large to fit with the memory. Since our server data sets are (I believe) around 1-2GB, having more than 4GB of RAM won't help matters. Database servers are generally designed to having enough RAM to fit the vast majority of the database into memory, at least where possible.

If we had 10-14GB databases, we would likely get lower results (more RAM = higher latency among other things), but the fundamental differences between platforms shouldn't change by more than 10%, and probably closer to 5%. Running larger databases with less memory would alter the benchmarks to the point where they would largely be stressing the I/O of the system - meaning the HDD array. Since HDDs are so much slower than RAM (even 15K SCSI models), enterprise servers try to keep as much of the regularly accessed data in memory as possible.

As for the Paxville article, click on the "IT Computing" link at the top of the website. Paxville is the second article in that list (and it was also linked once or twice within this article). Or http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2745">here's the direct link. Reply